Investigation of background electron emission in the LUX detector

Understand

Dual-phase xenon detectors, as currently used in direct detection dark matter experiments, have observed elevated rates of background electron events in the low energy region.

• While this background negatively impacts detector performance in various ways, its origins have only been partially studied.
• In this paper we report a systematic investigation of the electron pathologies observed in the LUX dark matter experiment.
• We characterize different electron populations based on their emission intensities and their correlations with preceding energy depositions in the detector.